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I don't understand why it could drastically increase the price of a Macbook. I can buy a ThinkPad or a Dell Latitude/Precision with a Sierra Wireless 4G M.2 card for only an extra $2-300, basically the price of the card if you were to buy it separately. Older generations of ThinkPads could also have a 4G M.2 card easily added after purchase because the antennas were built-in from the factory (did this with my X260).

I suppose (guessing) if this was a SoC and there were no standard M.2 slots, then I guess I could see why Qualcomm would want some extra royalties in that case.

Even with Apple margins, the cellular radio adds like $150 to an iPad.

The technical issues are accommodating it with the design decisions made. Personally, I think it’s a smarter decision to make the iPhone/iPad pairing model low friction, as Apple has.

This is also a small/minority use case. LTE laptops are a very small product category — nobody wants to add a cellular plan. This feature will only matter if carriers start killing cable with millimeter wave 5G.

How are carriers going to kill cable with 5G? Won't they still want to charge $10/Gb? If that's the case, 4G is already faster than a lot of people's current connection at $50. If you use more than 5 Gb per month, it wouldn't make sense to go full mobile.

For example, 30 minutes of TV every other day is already pushing 8 Gb...

When there are competitive spirits at work, prices magically drop. I pay Spectrum $69 for 100/5 service in my city, which has no other options. My brother pays $45 for 300/30 service 4 miles away in a suburb where Verizon has chosen to compete as there are fewer poor people.

Right now there's a 5G land-grab going on, with hundreds of millimeter-band 5G poles being dumped everywhere. I assume that's for a wireless fixed ISP service, as it doesn't add value for normal mobile service.

The only reason it adds $150 is the ridiculousness surrounding Qualcomm licensing.

If I remember correctly the royalty was $7.5 per iPhone. Not sure how that alone contributes to the $150 price hike.

There is at least $40 worth of BOM cost from additional Antenna, baseband Modem and other RF Related Component. And it is not only Qualcomm which collect royalty on LTE, Ericsson, Nokia, ZTE and many others all collect royalty.

I do remember the royalty fees for Non-Smartphone ( Or Devices with only Data line ) were cheaper. But together it would still easily be $30+.

What are the odds on the carriers actually doing that? I've been predicting that for like 10 years.

Theres really no great need in 4g for macbooks? I mean you can activate your wifis hotspot with handoff directly from your macbook without ever touching your iphone.

assuming you have an iphone, and it has plenty of battery...at one point after using the hotspot for a while my iphone showed a temperature warning, and I had to wait for it to cool off before I could use it again.

Having the laptop battery and cooling would be much better

Man, I use the hotspot function of my iPhone all the time and never have heat issues. I wonder why?

Probably a combination of what surface you have it sitting on and which case you use (if any).

And ambient temperature and air movement. Anything that impacts heat dissipation.

I was in Phoenix AZ last week when it was 115F and my phone’s hotspot shut down because the phone got too hot.

You were outside? I mean...

Not exactly outside, but in a building without air conditioning yes.

Yes it was awful.

Probably because you're close to whatever tower it's connecting to and the radio bits are not having to spend a bunch of energy screaming at the top of their lungs to be heard by the tower.

Even plastic clad android phones will get hot if you try and make a long phone call from BFE.

also the Mac may detect it as a metered mobile connection and defer/throttle background usage (updates, etc).

And internet sharing makes a lot more sense FROM a computer to a handheld than vice versa

You need the modem within a mobile phone, but now you're adding it to a laptop in addition. It isn't clear it makes more sense to me.

You could argue that perhaps the computer shouldn't have built in WiFi either - after all, it could tether to a phone (via a cable or Bluetooth) to use wi-fi.

Except WiFi modems are cheap because there is lots of competition and most of the patents are easy to license, so everything has WiFi now.

For me to have 4G access, I need to connect to a network, and for that I need to pay. I currently do this through my phone which I need to be connected when there is no wifi more than my laptop. Is the price of 4G access low enough to have this on my laptop in addition to my phone? Not currently.

On Google Fi it’s no additional charge.

> assuming you have an iphone

Any phone can do that, not only iPhones. How often are you on the move without a phone?

Also the battery argument is not so definitive since a laptop on 4G/5G would also consume battery. If you can connect your laptop to a wall outlet you can connect your phone too.

Apple has investigated this over the years, even getting as far as building a red board prototype 3G MacBook Pro in 2007:

https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-wants-its-3g-macbook-prototy...

(Green and blue boards tend to be for production-ready prototypes, red is fairly hacked together.)

I believe the objections are 50:50 software-related and battery. How do you set suitable data usage thresholds on a Mac which is running over a 3/4/5G LTE network? The thermal performance of MacBook Pro is already weak at the high end and battery life suffers.

I would be surprised if, when Apple switches to its own power efficient chipset in its portable Mac line, they don't offer a BTO option which includes cellular capabilities through a built-in SIM.

It’s not hard to write something that kills an interface shortly after the transmitted data crosses a threshold (I’ve done it multiple times for myself.) I’m still surprised apple has refused to add this to any of their OSes.

Assumes you have wifi hotspots in range and an iphone that's configured correctly with adequate battery.

the phone would be a wifi hotspot, sharing it's 4g connection with the laptop, via wifi.

Or if you don't have much battery, you can kill two birds with one stone by plugging the phone into the laptop and tethering over USB while charging it.

or you could buy a laptop with 4g :P

> The reason this is not a feature is that it would add a lot of cost related to patents and IP licensing.

Looking at the numbers here(1), this is not right. They sold ~46 millions iPhones, ~9 millions iPads for a rounded total of ~50 millions devices with a GSM modem. Meanwhile, they "only" sold ~5 millions Macs, which include all the laptops and desktop offerings. Therefore, adding a GSM device to all their mobile offerings would only mean ~10% increase in number of modems (assuming all of those 5 millions macs are actually laptops). I would "blame" the lack of such an offering on the same reason they don't offer many different ports, like headphones, non usbc usb, hdmi etc.

1. https://www.macworld.co.uk/news/apple/apple-financial-result...

You realize that qualcomm's ridiculous licensing terms entitles them to a percentage of the sales price of the end device, right? At $2-3k per laptop that's not exactly chump change and would likely lead to a noticeable price increase on a laptop that's already considered "overpriced" by the general public.

Qualcomm has royalty caps for smartphones, tablets, and laptops: https://investor.qualcomm.com/static-files/f2a607b2-efed-424...

Quote: We broadly provide per unit royalty caps that apply to certain categories of complete wireless devices, namely smartphones, tablets and laptops, which effectively provide for a maximum royalty amount per device.

Yet they keep all their licensing deals a secret so that statement means exactly nothing. That cap could be $20k for all we know. Furthermore it's negotiated per oem and at their discretion.

The Cap for Smartphone were $400.

Am I the only one noticing the irony in Apple complaining about overpriced premium devices (chipsets/modems in this case)?

No, I'm sure you're not the only one who has thought this. However, the apparent irony disappears quite readily when you examine the differences, the most important of which:

If you want a laptop but don't want to pay Apple prices, you can buy a laptop from Lenovo/Dell/Asus/you get the point.

If you want to play in the 4G/5G space you have to license Qualcomm's IP. They've been pretty aggressive about enforcing this. So aggressive in fact that they've been found guilty of anti-competitive behaviour by a US judge (in a case brought by the FTC), as well as by the EU (twice).

So yeah, in the face of that, it's difficult to argue that Apple's position - of selling premium devices in a competitive market - is in any way similar to Qualcomm's predatory tactics.

Now if you want to talk about the App Store on the other hand...

The better analogy is if apple claimed a portion of the income you generated by using their laptop for work.

or from the price you charged for your app?

its a component, not a marketplace.

I think you under-appreciate how stupendously expensive it is to settle patent disputes. There's no question that 4G would have been useful in laptops and given that Apple sells them at a premium, even small increases in market share are very lucrative. The reason they didn't was cost and mitigating risks infringing on relevant patents. For a phone this is essential and not optional, for a laptop this isn't the case.

If I remember correctly the price of the Qualcom "essentials" patents is based on the price of the whole device. So in that regard it would make sense to avoid laptops since there are smaller margins and the price tag is also higher.

Qualcomm has royalty caps for smartphones, tablets, and laptops: https://investor.qualcomm.com/static-files/f2a607b2-efed-424... [PDF]

Quote: We broadly provide per unit royalty caps that apply to certain categories of complete wireless devices, namely smartphones, tablets and laptops, which effectively provide for a maximum royalty amount per device.

> I think you under-appreciate how stupendously expensive it is to settle patent disputes.

I'm arguing that they already solved this issue, since they are selling so many devices with GSM modems. Unless you can provide documentation demonstrating otherwise, I am not going to believe their agreement is to use GSM modems only on iPhones and these particular models of iPads, but is to use GSM modems on whatever devices they see fit. I don't think Apple are that stupid to limit themselves like that.

It's very unlike Apple to deliberately ignore an opportunity to sell a bit of convenience as a premium. Lots of ipad owners own iphones and yet buy the ipad with a 4G modem that they technically don't need. An always on Mac Book Air that "just works" is such an obvious thing to do given the target demographic of people using this on the go, that there must be another reason than "we already sell iphones/ipads". I don't buy the "users don't need this argument" since, I see way too many people thethering their macs with separate access points that are definitely not their phone for this not to be a thing at least.

The royalty are based on a percentage of the Wholesale price of Laptop, and since Apple's Laptop are on the higher end, which means their royalty will be higher.

Not to mention Smartphone, Tablet, and Other devices each have different royalty rate. Which means you cant use the same terms for your iPhone and use those for your iCars.